My concept of the forces was that the overall force of such a device would be limited and of course not be anywhere near as powerful as a chemical rocket motor.
About in 2015 when Neodymium magnets were getting to be very popular I decided to give it a try. I had some limited results and didn't really understand why it worked.
The original model was made of Lego's with a simple rotor that had some magnets on one side and some solder on the other side to balance it. Since then I learned that most of what appeared to be working was from "Slip Stick Effect". That is how those little HexBug Nano things work. Basically if you have oscillation and friction it will make something move. It would work in water or on a surface but not in space at all. Since my experiments were on water it was obvious more study was needed.
Also it was necessary to simplify things so I put a little HexBug Spider robot with an IR Remote on a Styrofoam disc of about 8 inch diameter. I taped the magnets to the robot's head, which rotated side to side and I attached a fin to the Styrofoam disc.
Sure enough that simple demonstration worked. As I turned the robot's head from side to side the Styrofoam disc on which it was floating in a container of water rotated so that the magnets would align north and south. That pushed the fin in the water from side to side and the little contraption made its way from one end of the water container to the other.
Now I had my arms around the concept that the rotation created by a magnet in Earth's magnetic field could be strong enough to move a small "boat".
I stayed with the notion of the rotation or torque of the magnet in Earth's field and sought to understand how it could be translated into linear motion without actually pushing in the water.
Here is the video of one of those early experiments using a weight instead of a fin:
https://youtu.be/LFlmEjj2jmo
It can also be found on my Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyGGu_mvODGRjCdhbGc0Y9g?view_as=subscriber
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